I used the Preppy Kitchen recipe and weighed all my ingredients. I whipped the merengue by hand, making sure to get stiff peaks, and used very clean bowl. The recipe calls for Cream of tartar. I did use almond flour that expires this month, but i dont want to buy more. I macaronaged for about an hour before i got tired and let them sit on my counter. Tried again and they were just the same. I still piped them out of spite but did not bake, you can see me giving up with the last tray lol. I used gel food coloring. I am not using organic confectioners sugar.
I will be trying again today, any tips or suggestions appreciated!
by Notreallyusingreddit
10 Comments
Oh I had this problem, the macronage needs a bit more folding, until it’s smooth and shiny
In my humble opinion preppy kitchens video is full of unnecessary myths and nonsense ideas. If your batter doesn’t loosen up it usually points to a meringue issue and his video shows massively over whipped meringue. I would try a new recipe – something simple, no food coloring, and a YouTube video and just follow along. I personally like sugar bean, but most recipes do work. Macarons are mostly technique.
Also you must have the strongest arms to make meringue by hand. I couldn’t imagine doing that.
Good luck and happy baking.
Are you sure your scale wasn’t uneven? A batter this thick seems to me like it has too much dry ingredients in it
You may have over mixed the meringue but that’s difficult to do by hand
It doesn’t look like a macronage issue, it looks like a recipe/ratio issues. GENERALLY speaking, egg white grams should equal granulated sugar grams, and powder sugar/almond flour should be 105-110% of the egg white grams. There are so many different ratios though, something different works for everyone.
But, your batter looks like mine did when I used the wrong recipe for the wrong method.
Also, macronage should only take 5 minutes, MAYBE up to ten. If it’s gone past 15, something just wrong with the batter.
I just used this recipe (she has a YouTube video to accompany this!) and it was amazing. She said actually you might want just soft peaks not stiff peaks because of how fragile stiff peaks are.
https://jacksonsjob.com/french-macaron-recipe/
Here is the video:
https://youtu.be/_15WTg4_Qfg?si=NlOZmbHzZV9LcWr2
I found this recipe a lot simpler
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It looks like to me your almond flour is too oily and as you mix it more, more of the oils were pressed out causing your batter to be permanently thick. This is not an undermixing issue. I’ve had this issue before when making a very small batch of macarons and I believe my meringue dried out too much while mixing so the force caused the almond flour to express too much oil. You could try a recipe with a higher ratio of meringue (pies and tacos has a relatively higher meringue ratio) or toasting your almond flour before you make them and being careful when sifting it. I am not sure if you blend your almond flour in a food processor beforehand to get it finer, but if you do, be very careful and always blend with your powdered sugar.
Preppy Kitchen’s recipe ends up dry for me as well. The most recent time, I thought I’d try a spray bottle in between folds just to see if that would loosen it up. The meringue broke down(of course haha) and they were brittle with hollow shells. Other people on this sub have had the same problem with that recipe.
It looks to me like there is too much dry ingredients- like it became more like a amaretti cookie batter than a macaron. Macaron batter goes from looking like meringue to looking like shiny flowing lava as you mix- it shouldn’t ever look like this at any stage.
I’ve had the same thing happen. Someone suggested to add another egg white because it’s too dry. Maybe it’s the humidity?